Argonne National Lab Selects DDN’s Storage

DataDirect Networks, Inc. announced
that Argonne National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Laboratory,
has selected DDN’s Storage Fusion Architecture (SFA) storage technology to
support its IBM Blue Gene/Q system, Mira, a supercomputer in
support of open science.

"Computation and supercomputing allow us to
address some of the nation’s most challenging scientific problems. This
mission-critical research can only be achieved through large-scale
computational simulation and Big Data scalability," said Susan
Coghlan, Deputy Division Director at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility.
"To achieve our scientific mission,
our systems must be designed for the highest levels of performance and
scalability."

Deploying
during 2012, Mira will be capable of delivering a peak performance of 10
Petaflop/s, and will be powered by 35 petabytes of SFA12K storage technology
and its In-Storage Processing technology.

"DDN’s supercomputing customers are at the
forefront of data creation and processing, and are tackling scalability
challenges in advance of the broader computing and enterprise markets,"
said Jean-Luc Chatelain, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Technology at
DDN. "We deeply value our
partnerships with Argonne and IBM, and will
work towards delivering the thousand-fold scalability needed to conquer
tomorrow’s grand challenge scientific endeavors."

For the past
six years, DDN has worked with IBM, Argonne,
and other DOE customers on efforts aimed at enabling productive data-intensive
computing at massive scale. These efforts have resulted in several new DDN
technologies, including:

• In-Storage
  Processing: Leveraging in-storage computational resources and a highly
  optimized server virtualization engine, the SFA eliminates the need for
  parallel file system gateways, eliminates the need for storage area networking,
  and lowers data access latency.
• Storage
  Fusion Fabric:  The SFA is designed
  with an internal, non-blocking SAS fabric that operates 300% faster than what
  is required to sustain external network bandwidth. This performance
  over-provisioning allows systems to protect and ensure correct data in
  real-time, handle system failure correction, and exploit next-generation Flash
  technology, while also delivering maximum performance benefit and the highest
  sustained performance.
• Storage
  Fusion API: DDN’s scriptable API for simplified, automated SFA systems
  administration and monitoring.

DDN’s SFA12K series of
Big Data appliances are the fast storage systems and
designed to resolve the challenges associated with capturing,
processing and distributing data at hyperscale proportions.

The SFA12K
series includes the SFA12K-E, a 20GB/s parallel file storage appliance
featuring In-Storage Processing which enables organizations to embed scale-out
file system services and data-intensive applications; the SFA12K-20, a scale-up
storage platform which is capable of operating at 20GB/s and delivering over
850K sustained Flash IOPS; and the SFA12K-40, capable of operating at 40GB/s and delivering over 1.7 million
sustained Flash IOPS.